An IPA Approach towards Including Citizens’ Perceptions into Strategic Decisions for Smart Cities in Romania

Abstract

City administrators have begun to consider citizens’ perception as an essential enabler of smart and sustainable city development. In response to their need, our study mainly aimed to analyze the citizens’ perceptions related to the attributes of a smart city and to offer an evidence-based importance–performance analysis (IPA) technique, revised with triangular number fuzzy, to set priorities to develop it further successfully, taking Oradea, Romania, as an example. Specifically, we investigated varying the citizens’ perceptions regarding the attributes of a smart city across the thematic content analysis followed by an IPA approach to identify the attributes of a smart city that could be expected to advance its future development. The results show that most of our respondents appreciated the city administrators’ efforts and expressed relatively higher preferences for the fifteen smart city attributes of Oradea on which the local authorities should focus. The research brings valuable insight into the strategic decision making related to smart city development, which can serve academics and practitioners, complementing existing literature on the citizens’ perception of sustainable smart city development.